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A tug is assisting a loaded barge into a berth. The tug’s master misjudges the approach, the barge strikes the dock, and there is damage to the barge, the dock, and the cargo. Who pays depends almost entirely on two things. Which contract form governs, and which side of the Atlantic you are on. International towage has settled on a risk allocation that the United States Supreme Court declared void as a matter of public policy in 1955 and has never retreated from. That decisio

On 10 November 2025, the United States and China each suspended the port fee regimes they had imposed on one another's shipping. The suspension runs twelve months. It expires on 10 November 2026, which is roughly five weeks from now, and there is no guarantee it will be renewed. Most charter parties fixed since then have been written as though the fees do not exist, because at the moment of fixing they did not. If the measures resume, those contracts will be silent on a charg

A counterparty screens clean. The name returns no hits on the Specially Designated Nationals list, the company is registered in a jurisdiction with no sanctions program against it, and the vessel it owns has never appeared on a designation notice. None of that tells you the company is not sanctioned. Under the ownership rules applied by the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, an entity can be subject to an asset freeze without ever being named, purely b

The bill of lading is the most important document in international trade and one of the few that does three unrelated jobs at once. It is a receipt for goods, evidence of the contract of carriage, and a document of title that can be bought, sold, and pledged while the cargo is still at sea. Most of the disputes that arise around it come from confusing those functions or from treating the third one as a formality. A shipper who focuses on the description of goods, a carrier wh

In October 2006, the capesize bulk carrier Ocean Victory was discharging iron ore at Kashima in Japan when weather deteriorated. A long swell combined with a northwesterly gale reaching Force 9 on the Beaufort scale. The master decided to leave the berth, lost control of the vessel in the Kashima fairway, and she was driven onto the breakwater and became a total loss. The vessel's hull insurers paid, took an assignment of the owners' and demise charterer's rights, and brought

On September 9, a Federal Maritime Commission administrative law judge rejected Peloton Interactive's claim against Flexport in full. The company had sought $33.7 million in detention, demurrage, and storage charges accumulated during the pandemic-era supply chain disruption. It recovered nothing. The breakdown of what was claimed is instructive. Roughly $13.8 million in demurrage, $16.2 million in equipment detention, and $3.7 million in yard and warehouse storage, across th

A voyage charter gives the charterer a fixed period to load and discharge. Use less and the owner may owe despatch. Use more and the charterer owes demurrage. Between those two outcomes sits a calculation that is arithmetically simple and legally treacherous, and most disputes turn on which hours counted rather than on how the addition was done. The Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013 define laytime as the period of time agreed between the parties during which the ow

There is a version of the shadow fleet story that treats it as somebody else's problem. Sanctioned states move sanctioned oil on ships nobody reputable would touch, Western regulators chase them with designations, and operators running clean tonnage on legitimate trades watch from a safe distance. That version is wrong in a specific and expensive way. The shadow fleet now represents a large enough share of global tanker capacity that legitimate operators share water, anchorag

As of today, July 1, 2026, the United Kingdom's Emissions Trading Scheme has expanded to cover domestic maritime transport. For shipowners and operators running vessels on UK routes or calling at UK ports, this is not a future regulatory development to monitor, it is a live compliance obligation that began this morning. This post is a practical overview of what the UK ETS is, who it applies to, what it requires operators to do, and how it sits alongside the EU ETS framework t

China's New Maritime Code Is Now in Effect On May 1, 2026, four days ago, China's revised Maritime Code came into force. This marks the first comprehensive revision of the Code since its original enactment in 1993, and the changes are not minor adjustments around the edges. They affect cargo liability, limitation of liability amounts, the scope of who qualifies as a carrier, how damages are calculated, how limitation periods work, and, most significantly for international ope